Karkkiautomaatti - Kaikilla (2006)

CD1: Levy-Yhtiö 1993 EP: 1) En kai koskaan löydä sitä oikeaa; Rakkaudella EP: 2) Ei oo ei oo toivookaa; 3) Hei Johanna; 4) Annathan anteeksi; 5) Hyvää matkaa, kulta pieni; Kävelyllä EP: 6) Ja mua harmitti niin (joo joo); 7) Rakkautta ensisilmäyksellä; 8) Luulitsä niin; 9) Maailman komein poika; Karkuteillä: 10) Jää beibi jää; 11) Aina vaan jaa jaa jaa; 12) Kai vielä joskus muistat mua; 13) Toivon että huomaat; 14) Hei okei mä meen; 15) Paina kaasua, honey!; 16) Äl-oo-vee; 17) Särkyneen sydämen twist; 18) Taaskin turhaan... 19) Tanssi vaan; 20) Takaisin en tuu; 21) Yeah yeah Jenni; 22) Kaikki menee pää edellä surffaamaan; Trallalalla EP: 23) Ymmärtää jos voisit näin; 24) Nyt lähtee rock 'n' roll; 25) Hyvästi Yyteri; 26) Uskomaton tapaus; 27) Ykkösbussi; 28) Modesty Blaise; Kaksi-nolla: 29) Niin oot kaveria!; 30) Huimaa, huimaa (Maagista vetovoimaa); 31) Inhat silmät tuijottaa; 32) Luonnon helmaan; 33) Minun ikioma kesälaulu; 34) Nimi muistiossa; 35) Karkkiautomaatti bop; 36) Pliis Denise; 37) Sovitelma: erätauko; 38) Viikonloppu kahdestaan; 39) Vanha älppärini soi (Soi dadididididamdaa); 40) Ja kesä hiipuu hiljaa...

CD2: Lämmöllä EP: 1) Hölmö kaikkein aikojen; 2) Toinen onneen vie; 3) Stimango; Seikkailuun (Single): 4) Kuutamo; Susan (Single): 5) Kuutamox kaikuu; Suudelmilla: 6) Rio Wamba; 7) Arvoitus on meille poika tuo; 8) Seikkailuun; 9) Nyt heitän arpakuution; 10) Toinen onneen vie (Albumiversio); 11) Yks-kaks-motocross; 12) Minne vaan; 13) Parisuhteen aakkoset; 14) Mä tahdon romanssin; 15) Voi kuinka on tää maailmain; 16) Kemijoki; 17) Susan; 18) Wambada; 19) Kaks-kol-motocross (Chinon & Rhodes Remix)

The collected works of an uniquely charming Finnish cult classic band, with one genuine classic in their back catalogue.

Key tracks: "Niin oot kaveria!", "Seikkailuun", "Minne vaan"

The 59 songs on Kaikilla collects together the entire recorded output of Karkkiautomaatti, a Finnish cult band who operated between 1993 and 1998, and who never had any option other than to be a cult band. With lyrics and attitude directly indebted to 50s rock 'n' roll and Finnish schlager, melodies straight out of bubblegum pop, the energy and playing style of the dodgy punk band your friends put together for fun and Janne Kuusela’s ridiculously saccharine vocals, Karkkiautomaatti were a baffling concoction who had so much inate charm that they inspired grassroots devotion with their overly earnest puppy love songs, often played side by side with hard rock covers in the live set. But behind the quirkiness were real strengths: Kuusela had a genuine talent for arrangement and melody, and bassist Sami Häikiö and particularly drummer Mikko Huusko were the energetic firecrackers underneath.

The first disc of Kaikilla covers the first two albums - 1994’s Karkuteillä and 1996’s Kaksi-nolla - as well as various peripheral EPs and singles around the long-plays. Despite the breadth of material, everything goes forward pretty breezily, with both albums running at 20-25 minutes and the EPs barely reaching five minutes, as the band finish their songs in an average of a minute and a half. The brevity works in their favour. Karkkiautomaatti had a consistent style (90% of the first disc is more or less the same song over and over again but with a different vocal hook), but wildly inconsistent quality control: one minute you're face to face with an ingeniusly lovely melody, and the literal next minute you may as well be listening to a school band’s first practice session going awry. It doesn't make for a great listen per se but the adorably slapdash nature of it all is part of early Karkkiautomaatti's charm and it plays well together with the song material. With the songs being so short and everything flying by so quickly, any clunkers are quickly brushed off and barely slow things down. Taking it all in during a single 70-minute block as presented on Kaikilla can get a bit hectic, and so the original running lengths for these releases make sense: something as syrupy and at times shambolic as this is best enjoyed in small bursts.

 

There isn’t much development across the first set of releases either. The recording quality gets better as time goes by, and Kaksi-nolla sees the start of the band developing their sound a bit further, with some additional instrumentation, introducing an acoustic song and even going as far as getting close (but not over!) the prog-tastic three minute song length barrier. It does feel bad to brush off so much of the first disc with barely a mention but overall, while there’s a number of genuinely fun, great little pop nuggets across the early days, Kaksi-nolla is the apex of Karkkiautomaatti’s initial sound and it houses the best songs on the otherwise somewhat samey (positively or not, depending on the mood) first disc. If there’s a song that perfectly describes the ethos of the band, it’s the Kaksi-nolla opening track “Niin oot kaveria!”, with its obnoxiously catchy backing vocals, ridiculously sweet melodies and the scruffy-round-the-edges playing that binds them together into a stupidly jolly ray of sunshine.  

Karkkiautomaatti had almost as many drummers during their lifetime as they had releases, but the Lämmöllä EP released after Kaksi-nolla found the band in a limbo point in-between percussionists, and it turned out to be an unexpected sea change moment for the band. Rather than the EP seeing the now-duo acting out a stripped down interpretation of the band, Kuusela and Häikiö started to experiment in a homebrewed version of a studio wizardry moment. The three songs on the EP, which starts the second disc, represent the birth of Karkkiautomaatti 2.0. "Hölmö kaikkein aikojen" reimagines the band's traditional sugary pop formula with vintage keyboards and drum machines in lieu of the rock & roll aesthetic of the releases before it, "Toinen onneen vie" is an honest-to-earth anthem that grows and develops further than any of the 40 songs before it, and the instrumental rock-out "Stimango" has a muscular touch previously amiss from the band even at their most punk rock. The goofy and naïve band of the first disc who embraced their amateurish charm have finally decided to stop fooling around and to take some time to grow up a little, in the process tapping onto aspects that were always in the background but had been perhaps intentionally obscured before.

This leads directly into the band’s third and final album, 1998’s Suudelmilla. The liner notes for Kaikilla features, alongside a general biography, a number of small blurbs by friends and industry mates of the band, and even nearly all of them admit it’s Suudelmilla where everything finally clicked and Karkkiautomaatti became something to seriously watch out for. With the additions of drummer Vesa Lehto and arguably more importantly Jenni Rope on keyboards, Karkkiautomaatti built upon the previous EP’s growth and took it to a full length format. It sees the band staying honest to everything they stood for before, but elaborating further and thinking bigger. So, with Suudelmilla, Karkkiautomaatti moved from cult classics to releasing a straight-up classic.

Suudelmilla is brimming with honest ambition, abandoning the quickfire format and instead opting for longer song lengths which allow the band to expand and adapt their writing in ways they were restricted from before. The keyboards and organs have become a definitive part of the band’s sound alongside a generally more layered production style with all kinds of vintage sounds and sampled sound effects bouncing wildly like they’re overflowing, and the band have all but switched out of the tongue-in-cheek punked-up pop in favour of more analytical songcraft and indulgement in new ideas. Thus, you end up with unprecedented moments such as the psychedelic breakdown of “Nyt heitän arpakuution” that practically interrupts the song’s ordinary flow, “Yks-kaks-motocross” that could have soundtracked a video game action sequence, the atmospheric instrumental “Kemijoki” that stretches its soft textures across over seven minutes, and the bizarro tropicalia of “Rio Wamba” and “Wambada”. But the absolute best part of of Suudelmilla is how breaking away from their conventions underlines and emphasises Kuusela’s talent for songcraft, because those sweet indie pop melodies are now paired with songs that give them the throne they deserve. Any Anglospheric peer of the band would’ve killed to have the gigantic “Susan” in their back catalogue, “Minne vaan” and its swirling guitars and genuinely epic extended finale is quite possibly the best thing Karkkiautomaatti ever released, and the frolicking “Seikkailuun” even landed the band with a genuine radio hit which feels bizarre given how whimsical it is. As if to prove a point, “Toinen onneen vie” appears on Suudelmilla once more, this time polished to perfection with a new drive underneath and hunger in its eyes, crowning itself for the throne it was destined to be after making its initial EP appearance.

Suudelmilla is undoubtedly the highlight of the entire compilation and the key reason why Karkkiautomaatti have retained their relevance to date rather than ending up as a curio for musical archivists. As charming and lovely as the majority of their discography can be, the first few albums and EPs are a scattershot display split between what’s actually good fun and what’s just pleasant filler. Meanwhile, Suudelmilla has become an iconic and influential part of the Finnish independent music canon, and so much of what would take place in the Finndie scene in the decade after its release would be coloured in its shades - and it remains just as charismatic and magical today. That the band amicably split shortly after the release of Suudelmilla (for no apparent reason that I can find) just further enhances its legacy: for their last act they captured a lightning in a bottle. and in doing so closed off a short but genuinely unique career in a way that no one could have predicted. The existence of Kaikilla is a small pop cultural act of importance, and a wonderful way to dig into a truly memorable discography even if after the matter it's the second disc that ends up getting most of the airtime.

Rating: 8/10

David Bowie - Black Tie White Noise (1993)

1) The Wedding; 2) You've Been Around; 3) I Feel Free; 4) Black Tie White Noise; 5) Jump They Say; 6) Nite Flights; 7) Pallas Athena; 8) Miracle Goodnight; 9) Don't Let Me Down & Down; 10) Looking for Lester; 11) I Know It's Gonna Happen Someday; 12) The Wedding Song

Bowie starts his 1990s with a smooth jump to a new sound, and makes it his own so well that he's actually created a consistent record. 

Key tracks: "Jump They Say", "Pallas Athena", "Miracle Goodnight"

The 1990s were a reset for Bowie. Much has been made out of his 80s albums - probably too much - but it's clear that towards the end of the decade his magic had started to wane for the first time during his career. After taking a break from his day job while focusing on Tin Machine for a few years, the table was clean for Bowie to return in any way he pleased: for a man so keen to reinvent himself at any given turn, the start of the new decade after a small hiatus was a perfect time as any to begin anew.

Bowie's 90s are characterised by him falling in love with the electronic, club and hip hop scenes that were exploding at the time, and Black Tie White Noise is the careful first toe dip into those waters. It nods particularly towards house and hip hop, and while it's still more hesitant about fully merging those genres into Bowie's repertoire in comparison to how far his later 90s embraced their respective inspirations, they lend a clear and identifiable sound for the record: flourished with the iconic house pianos, loop-like drum processing, deep synth pads and the ever-present saxophone (played by Bowie himself, who rediscovered his love for the instrument during the studio time). It's obviously incredibly of its time, but its dated nature has sincere warmth to it in its big budget early 90s studio flashiness, which I admittedly have a big soft spot for. It's all incredibly smooth (to the point that when going through my first draft of this review it turns out I had described nearly every song as 'smooth'), in the way that many rock icons of yesteryear approached the 1990s. It's clear though that Bowie was genuinely curious about the new ideas he was tuning into at the time rather than just following the crowds, and he was eager to experiment with how he could best take these sounds forward on his own - you know Bowie's particularly inspired when he's writing instrumentals, and there's a grand total of three on Black Tie White Noise, albeit "The Wedding" is largely just an instrumental version of "The Wedding Song". In contrast "Pallas Athena", the centerpiece dance anthem, is so far removed from typical Bowie fare that it was even re-released under a different name to see if anyone would be fooled. For most parts though, in comparison to some of Bowie's earlier (and later) chameleon acts, Black Tie White Noise is more of a rejunevation than a drastic re-invention: from a songwriting perspective it's by and far what you'd expect from a Bowie record, with the old dog playing with tricks he knows that works, just with a new coat on.

The other facet that characterises Black Tie White Noise is just how positive it is. It's among Bowie's most upbeat albums: even the songs about the 1992 Los Angeles Riots ("Black Tie White Noise") and his brother's suicide ("Jump They Say") are filled with creative joie de vivre. Part of it is down to just how excited he was about these new influences, but in general, life was good for Bowie. His recent marriage had him still floating in a state of blissed out happiness and that kind of glossy-eyed enamourment is all over the record: particularly in "The Wedding Song" which he had literally composed for his wedding, and the light-footed and unabashedly lovefool "Miracle Goodnight". Black Tie White Noise is a record made by someone who's in a great place in his life and who directs that energy into their music, which translates to a particular sharpness in songwriting. In fact, the only thing that lets the record down is not even his own song, but the Morrissey cover "I Know It's Gonna Happen Someday". It's not only in the wrong crowd in tone and aesthetic, but Bowie intentionally hams it up to the point of it being at times unbearable; in particular there's this vocal run that Bowie sometimes does which sounds like a bizarre take on Krusty the Klown's laughter, and this song is full of it, and it breaks me away from the song each and every time. On the other hand, the Cream cover "I Feel Free" is a perfect fit to the album's mood and aesthetic, and among the more successful Bowie covers.

The singles are almost always the cream of the crop with Bowie's albums and this time it's the boisterous synth-rock "Jump They Say" that's the big Bowie classic of the album, and among my favourite songs of his catalogue. It's a subtly dark lyric matched with one of his most charismatic vocal performances, has a chorus that glides so effortlessly into such majestic heights, the futuristic production that even today sounds like a sci-fi utopia and it's rife with bountiful arrangement details (with the filtered backing vocals being a particular personal favourite). Like many of Bowie's best songs it's bombastic and attention-grabbing (or seeking) yet it's thoroughly sincere in its delivery, and while clearly indebted to a particular period in time it's still somehow timeless and immortal through how Bowie sells it. The two other singles - the title track and "Miracle Goodnight" - are also incredibly infectious in their own right and really highlight how Bowie was at his most excited and exciting when trying out new sounds. "Miracle Goodnight" and its bubbly slap bass and ridiculous effect-laden production is so sugar sweet you'd have to have a heart of stone not to smile when it's on: it's a silly song and openly so (the spoken word bridges are absolutely in on the joke), but it sidesteps its corniness by being so flirtatious and charming you end up falling head over heels for it. "Black Tie White Noise" is, appropriately, the album in a nutshell from a sonical perspective, though amusingly  Bowie almost takes a backseat to Al B. Sure's ever-present vocals. It's the least of the three, but the lush cooldown of a chorus and the oh-so-Bowie "noi-oi-oi-oise" vocal hook ensure it sticks with the other two.

The sound and the singles being great is nothing new to Bowie, but what makes Black Tie White Noise worth a special mention is that it's among Bowie's most cohesive and continuously strong records throughout its length. My hot take (which I'll probably repeat across my Bowie reviews ad nauseam) is that Bowie very rarely made consistent records because of his up-and-down songwriting, incoherent and oft ill-fitting cover songs, and the frequent and obvious focus on the deemed singles of the project at the expense of deep album cuts that could stand up next to them. Yet, those aspects almost all but absent from Black Tie White Noise and many of its album tracks stand out positively just as much as the more famous songs. The wonderfully frantic "You've Been Around" (one of the few times the album moves away from its constant positivity to somewhere a little darker) and the atmospheric "Nite Flights" in particular could have slotted comfortably in a singles collection in their own right, and they show how Bowie's chosen production style for this record truly amplifies what he was going for - with songwriting and sound working hand-in-hand from the start. Sometimes the (intended or not) emphasis on the production gives way towards unexpected joys: the instrumental "Looking for Lester" with its rising horns and gliding piano parts remind me so much of the first Sonic Adventure that I love the song just because of that. But in terms of the instrumental, it's "Pallas Athena" that comes up the strongest. It's such a swerve for Bowie, but it's a little wonder of an arrangement with the increasing layers of strings that drive the tension that the saxophone and synth pads try to combat. It's such an excellent, transcendental piece of 90s dance music and the idea that it's on a David Bowie record is still wild.

It's not quite a perfect record and its issues are largely relegated towards its end. We've already covered "I Know It's Gonna Happen Someday" which really shouldn't have been covered to begin with, and as much as I like "The Wedding Song", at the end of the day it's largely the same song as the version that opens the album, just with vocals, and it probably should have opened the album while the instrumental version was relegated to a single b-side. If you'd have swapped "Looking for Lester" a place further up the tracklist and had the record be closed by the suave last dance of the night "Don't Let Me Down & Down", it would've been a great finale for the record; better than the way it fizzles out now, certainly. But even that blemish is barely enough to raise when discussing the record because of all its other accomplishments. I have a strange track record with Bowie, but my favourite kind of Bowie nearly always happens when he's reassessing his place in pop culture and sets a plan to move forward in his own way. Black Tie White Noise is one of his most emblematic in that regard: a rejuvenated Bowie putting wheels in motion for the next decade after getting a scent of a new well of ideas to take inspiration from, and then turning those sounds so identifiably into his own. It worked out so well, it started off one of Bowie's strongest decades.

Rating: 8/10

 

Kent - Vapen & ammunition (2002)

1) Sundance Kid; 2) Pärlor; 3) Dom andra; 4) Duett (feat. Titiyo); 5) Hur jag fick dig att älska mig; 6) Kärleken väntar; 7) Socker; 8) FF; 9) Elite; 10) Sverige

Sharp, polished and straight to the point. Kent weaponise pop hooks and take aim.

Key tracks: "Sundance Kid", "Socker", "FF"

My primary complaint with Hagnesta Hill was that it was overstuffed, that Kent were going for excess when they didn’t necessarily have a clear end goal in mind. The band thought the same, which is why when going into the follow-up Vapen & ammunition their plan was to create a record that would be straight to the point. Ten songs with a ‘don’t bore us, get to the chorus’ attitude, written to stand independently with no real album concept in mind, each of which could be a single candidate. In the interest of retaining things economical even the now-traditional epic centrepiece is absent, with the six-minute “Elite” coming closest but still remaining a great distance away from the grand rock-outs of the last three records.

To serve the hits-or-bust approach, Kent have opted for a meticulously polished production for Vapen & ammunition. The incredibly processed sound all over the record is perfectionist in nature, with each filtered drum hit and keyboard layer coming across crystal clear and mechanically precise. It’s closer to the sheen of a multi-million budget pop album rather than the rock aesthetic that even Hagnesta Hill held onto closely even while it went for a heavy studio sound. The songs underneath the mirror glaze get to the point without dawdling around, with every section of each charging ahead with a clear key melody or sticking point. The title (“weapons and ammunition”, derived from scattered lyrics across the record) and the white tiger that graces the liner art are incredibly appropriate for the album: its pop instincts are smart and aggressive like a beast on a prowl and each of its songs has been engineered to deadly perfection, the hooks wielded with weapon-like efficiency. The album even opens up with an air raid siren, effective in its own right but also perhaps a very literal signal that Kent are not playing around with their chosen tools this time around.

It works frighteningly well. It’s not quite the ten hit singles it wants to be, but only because it’s hard to imagine how you could make successful singles out of the densely dreamy atmospheric wonder of “Hur jag fick att älska mig” (production highlight: the kick drum made to sound like a heartbeat for such a directly lovelorn song), or the stripped down acoustic closer “Sverige”; both are clear successes as songs though, and "Sverige" in particular provides a necessary counterpoint to the rest of the album’s hi-fi indulgence. Nothing on Vapen & ammunition is new to Kent and it’s not like they’ve shied away from catchy choruses before, it's simply that the band hone into them this time around. Musically the band are therefore on solid footing and Vapen & ammunition shines the spotlight on some of their more immediate strengths. What helps cut through the richness and sweetness of the album is frontman Jocke Berg, who continues to to branch into new topics lyrically and widening the band's scope in his own part. Many of the songs on the record may act like singalong-ready chart toppers but hide a heavy, worn-out heart underneath, more socially and politically conscious of the world around and hiding the frustration behind a chorus you can belt out.

The three big singles that did end up getting released from the album jump out from the tracklist, though arguably in part because they were such airwave hogs, and they demonstrate the record’s sharply tuned attitude really well. "Dom andra" in particular is still absolutely dominating right from its breath-as-beat intro, riding a blade-sharp electro-rock drive and an iconic whistle hook through a curiously structureless form that's like a free-form rant that became a pop song; even if it has lost some of its glimmer over the years, it's the sort of song where you can absolutely understand why it became the band’s signature song from a popular perspective, especially when it changes gears towards its impassioned finale and Berg breaks the cold and detached tone he’s held onto all song. That said, I have always preferred the slow moody disco of "Kärleken väntar" and the high-speed steamroller hooks of "FF" over their more popular sibling. "Kärleken väntar" is a direct descendant of Hagnesta Hill's slick disco-rock hit "Musik non stop" (which may as well have acted as blueprint for Vapen & ammunition), with a dancefloor-pounding beat and subtly churning guitars that meet somewhere between lovestruck ecstasy and emotional distance that gives it a curious uneasiness which sticks out. Meanwhile "FF" is arguably the best example of how Kent wanted to represent themselves in 2002 in production, mood and tone: 0 to 100 in a split second, an inescapable backbeat tapping straight into the spine and a tour de force double-chorus. 

That said, the three singles aren't among the album’s real stand-out songs, and it's the deep cuts of Vapen & ammunition that have eold up the strongest. "Socker" in particular is as classic Kent as it gets and is in fact a firm member of my personal Kent pantheon: there’s a heartwringing ache to its sighing melodies so strong it’s absolutely arresting, it features some of Berg’s most evocative writing (the second verse in particular) and on this album specifically its loud bursts of pure guitar walls shake up the tracklist's flow in a rejuvenating, and necessary, fashion. "Pärlor" is the only other truly guitar-heavy song of the record and is a reliably powerful stormer meant to play at loud volume for maximum effect, but its real secret weapon are the back-and-forth vocals in its verses. The same applies throughout Vapen & ammunition. As Kent have pushed the guitars into a less dominant role, they’ve filled the gaps with textural keyboards and most notably layered vocals and backing harmonies that appear throughout the album in a significant role. "Elite" and its gospel choir take that to its logical conclusion and though the song has always sounded a little too obvious as a big stadium anthem, there's an earnestness and glimmer to it that warms it up. It may be a big, big song but Berg pulls it back towards himself and the listener and retains some of that intimacy that its sentimental lyrics convey. “Sundance Kid”, the opener, is more or less all of the above: its lead guitar line is the first big power hook of the record until the double vocals of the chorus take its place, the loudly mixed drums are designed to capture the attention of anyone who hears their battle cry and there’s thrill to how the song unfolds. I appreciate a bold opener that acts as a statement of intent and “Sundance Kid” is the perfect gateway into Vapen & ammunition.

The one thing Vapen & ammunition slightly stumbles with is cohesiveness, and that's largely down to design. It's an album of loose songs that are playlisted next to one another, and even with years of listening they still feel like a sequence of jarring cuts from one song to the next. This is best highlighted by the mid-album double slow jam whammy of "Duett" (a perfectly nice ballad duet with Titiyo and with another strong chorus, but also clearly the song that leaves the least imprint afterwards) and "Hur jag fick att älska mig", which pulls the otherwise energetic album to a halt for a little too long in one go. As far as the songs go though, even if they're not cohesive they're consistent and excellently so. The batting average is really strong and Kent operating in this sort of high-intensity pop song craftsmanship channel is exciting in its own way, and at ten songs the trick doesn’t wear out. There’s mayhaps less nuance to Vapen & ammunition than to most other Kent albums, but the band pack it with enough strengths in other areas that as far as one-off direction exercises go, it can stand proud and tall as a great collection of songs. The album serves as an appropriate statement of Kent’s commercial imperial phase that the band were enjoying at the time: the “album full of singles” tract is something that few artists can pull off satisfyingly no matter how much they boast, but with Vapen & ammunition Kent took the opportunity to demonstrate why they had become Sweden’s biggest band within the last few years and they backed it up with songs that were fit to defend that title.

Rating: 8/10

Arcade Fire - Everything Now (2017)

1) Everything_Now (Continued); 2) Everything Now; 3) Signs of Life; 4) Creature Comfort; 5) Peter Pan; 6) Chemistry; 7) Infinite Content; 8) Infinite_Content; 9) Electric Blue; 10) Good God Damn; 11) Put Your Money on Me; 12) We Don't Deserve Love; 13) Everything Now (Continued)

What you may know it from: awkward and clunky antics. What you should know it from: its restless and quirky pace and fun grooves.

Key tracks: "Everything Now", "Signs of Life", "Put Your Money on Me"

Following on from Reflektor, by the mid-2010s Arcade Fire had embraced their conceptual side, marrying their music together with visuals and elaborate theatrics to create something greater and more meaningful than "just" a new record. That was one of the great aspects of Reflektor that I particularly responded to on a personal level, and so the band continuing on that route was a development I quite liked in theory. But three years later, when the band tried to focus even harder on making an all-encompassing conceptual setpiece around Everything Now, the results were the complete opposite.

It's almost impossible to discuss Everything Now and not mention all the peripheral material, and that's largely because the band made such a big deal about it themselves that it succumbed the actual album. I'm a cynical millennial who has by now lived through three economic recessions in my lifetime but even I admit that the shtick about an all-devouring Jeff Bezos corporate wet dream hellscape was an ill-fitting and sometimes even ill-advised angle to try and make your campaign revolve around on: instead of nodding in agreement as Arcade Fire preached to the choir, the execution was painfully heavyhanded as the ideas and inspiration turned out to be little beyond how consumerism and capitalism are, like, bad. Between the band's social media profiles getting 'taken over' by their corporate overlords, the fake advertisements that got spammed through them and the overconceptualised press releases, the point got lost somewhere within all the anvilicious satire. It wasn't inventive, original or even that smart or funny, and yet the roll-out was pushed with such self-certainty of its own strengths that it actively got you thinking whether the more ironic moments of the band's past antics were ever that ironic after all. It was all getting a little too close to U2 at their worst.

The real tragedy of the Everything Now roll-out is that all the shenanigans managed to completely drown the record itself underneath the noise and the reputation that still lingers around the album, which is undeserved because Everything Now is a seriously great and weird album that its clichéd concept does absolutely no justice to. There is no clear angle to Everything Now musically: while its sound is rooted in the same slick groove-laden synth-rock vibe that was introduced on parts of Reflektor, it's far more accurately a record that sounds like whatever it wants at any given time. If anything, it's the anything-goes mentality of the first half of Reflektor taken to even further lengths, where no idea is too preposterous or absurd to be corporated into to the Arcade Fire repertoire. It's not just the band playing dress-up, but they're irreverent and rowdy about it, testing out new outfits and discarding them abruptly immediately afterwards, taking the listener for a ride that's likely to raise more than few confused exclamations the first time around. But the particularly cheeky way the band pull this through is what makes it also a genuinely fun album in all its sound-twisting delivery. You can hear the audacity and the rebellious joy that the band operate on throughout Everything Now, which once again runs against so much of the po-faced delivery of its promotional run. Even the lyrics get in on the fun more often than they wave a finger at CEOs: for example the synth freak-out "Creature Comfort" is a fine song in itself (there's definitely something to marvel at in its busy and untamed production) but its clear highlight is "she dreams about dying all the time / she told me she came so close / filled up the bathtub and put on our first record", which is pretty much the perfect jab to place within a record that is bound to alienate even further those who think Funeral was the band's last real triumph. It's the kind of self-aware nod that most of the promotional mess around the record tried to handle but failed. I honestly don't know what the end game for the revolving roulette of ideas of Everything Now was, but it doesn't get enough credit for being an album that constantly keeps you on your toes and does so in positive manner, where tonal whiplashes form into a strange but incredibly catchy journey along the way.

 
Which makes the title track, which was released as the lead single and which opens the album after the looping intro/outro reprises, a gigantic red herring even though it's arguably come to represent the album the most. From a band who always sounded like their sound would only ever fit stadiums, comes their first genuine stadium anthem: complete with a group vocal featuring literally hundreds of people captured in the kind of live setting that this song was made for, a bluntly open invite to ask people to partake into its charms. "Everything Now" is a fantastic song, don't get me wrong - it's a masterclass example of how to make a stadium pop song genuinely come to life and to sound absolutely magical in its size. It is also, however, a very conventional song to front and to represent an album that really isn't one in the slightest, and so it in no way prepares for what's actually coming up after it.

Take for example the disco/funk assault of "Signs of Life", right behind. It's perhaps not so unexpected as a stylistic exercise after Reflektor's foray under the mirrorball, but there is no way you can be prepared for the knowingly cheesy call-and-answer backing vocals and Win Butler spending a verse rapping through the weeks of the day. From there the song just goes more and more beautifully over-the-top as it progresses, becoming a delirious joyride -  there's so much excitement and fun to it and its delivery, right down to the delicious disco violins, and it's where co-producer Thomas Bangalter's Daft Punk backbone-tapping groove magic shines the most. "Chemistry" tipsily wobbles around a light reggae vibe and has a real wink in its eye with its lovelorn lyrics and it comes across like an oddball cover of an old showtune, and why it's on an Arcade Fire record who knows but it slyly charms with its wiles. The bubbly slow jam "Peter Pan" feels almost normal in this context, but that sense of harmony is quickly broken down when the "Infinite Content" duo storms the stage: first by blowing the door open with a ramshackle punk attitude, before it abruptly cuts into an americana ballad for its second act. Both of those halves could be a brilliant song on their own if fleshed out into a full-length segment (especially the first one with its downright exhuberant instrumental breaks): as the two halves are bashed together like this, you have a bewildering but thrilling double-interlude wrecking havoc in the middle of the record.

Towards its end Everything Now starts to calm down as it moves towards a more emotive, perhaps a more sincere finale, away from the bait-and-switch antics of its first half. The Regine-sung "Electric Blue" is a wonderful synth pop anthem for dancing by yourself through a 3am city centre (I only nick some points off for the atypically shrill vocal production which grates against the rest of the song's atmosphere) and the subtle "Good God Damn" has grown from the obvious filler cut of the album to a suavely captivating little brooder whose bass-heavy drawl learns to linger around in your head much longer than you originally anticipated, but they're primarily the bridge for the traditional Arcade Fire big finish. "Put Your Money on Me" is where everything comes together: it's as slick and refined as anything on the record but it also speeds into a surprising whirlwind of a post-chorus where the spirit of ABBA possesses the band seemingly out of nowhere. The sound is the closest approximation to what could constitute as Arcade Fire's core in 2017, but the heart and emotion in it is practically vintage in its earnestness, resonance and urgency. It it, as they say, a hell of a song. "We Don't Deserve Love" effectively starts as its extended coda, pulling that emotion right into the forefront, before coming to life as its own majestic entity. It's a space-age synth power ballad slowly unfurling into a supernova explosion of lights and dramar, covering itself in layers of melodies and harmonies and sounding so vulnerable despite its size. There's so much acting and facade in the whole story arc for Everything Now, but for the closure of the album itself the band simply serve the same kind of great emotional warmth that they've always done best - as if to say that even though it's been an unexpected trip, they're still the same band.

And that, I guess, is my hot take on Everything Now: that despite everything trying to point otherwise it's still by the same band who were behind the previous set of records too and it carries the strengths they've always had. It's absolutely a different frontier for Arcade Fire and Everything Now is without a doubt a mystifying record, one which I can't wait to read a detailed postmortem on some day in the future simply because it does sound like the band snapped one day when brainstorming ideas for their next record. But it's also a captivating, engaging and at the end of the day - and perhaps most of all - a powerfully entertaining record. Its anthems aren't often the emotionally evocative kind, but it's hard to complain about the record when I'm tapping my foot to its rhythms, unexpectedly dancing in my living room to it and getting swept by the melodic rush of energy that surges through the record. Even though it presents itself as some kind of an attempt at a deep statement on capitalism and corporations, that angle turns out to be more window dressing than actual real content, and you can count the songs on the album that tap into those Deep Thoughts just by using fingers on one of your hands. What Everything Now does represent is a record where the band in fact let their hair down for once. It's addictive and just so damn fun to listen to that I'm beginning to wonder if its detractors have ever even really paid attention to it. 

This post has been sponsored by our friends at Everything Now®.

Rating: 8/10

Physical corner: Everything Now came with two different cover versions, the ‘day’ version (pictured and owned) and the more limited ‘night’ variant; I chose the day one simply because the warm orange shade appeals to my tastes more. Gatefold housed in a plastic sleeve which bears additional artwork details and the tracklist (depicted as corporate logos). Fold-out lyrics sheet in classic Arcade Fire style, this time stylised as a newspaper’s adverts page.

Arcade Fire - Reflektor (2013)

CD1: 1) Reflektor; 2) We Exist; 3) Flashbulb Eyes; 4) Here Comes the Night Time; 5) Normal Person; 6) You Already Know; 7) Joan of Arc

CD2: 1) Here Comes the Night Time II; 2) Awful Sound (Oh Eurydice); 3) It’s Never Over (Hey Orpheus); 4) Porno; 5) Afterlife; 6) Supersymmetry

Shorter than your average double album but packed with far more concepts than normal. Arcade Fire start a new chapter of their career with a dense beast you can dance to.

Key tracks: “Reflektor”, “It’s Never Over (Hey Orpheus)”, “Afterlife”

By Reflektor, Arcade Fire had openly become a band who were just as much about their concepts as they were about their music, and those two aspects held hands very tightly. There had been a gradual shift from Funeral's coordinated Victorian hipster uniforms to the carefully planned recurring motifs and visual accompaniments of The Suburbs, with Arcade Fire spending more time with each album to create some form of mythology around them. Reflektor itself above all signals a new chapter for the band and a re-invention of sorts, but its new sound often distracts from what an incredibly dense record it is from a thematic perspective. If the band were emphasising the conceptual aspects of their songwriting process then Reflektor is where that cup started to risk overflowing: it's an album that places its foot in so many doorways and crams a number of entirely disparate concepts together into a wide collage, with a rabbit hole of ideas hidden underneath waiting to swallow up its listeners. 

 

It's understandable though that the new musical direction attracts the most attention. All great artists go through a skinshedding moment eventually and in the case of Arcade Fire, theirs was to suddenly and shockingly move from beloved indie anthems into disco-ready floor stompers. Except, not quite. For one thing, it's not as if the concept of putting a groove on was ever alien to the band - check out all those four-to-the-floor finales on Funeral - and so Reflektor is more of an extension of something that was always lying underneath. But most damningly narrowing the scope down to just the prevalence of open hi-hat beats sells the album's range short. It's true that its most prominent moments are clearly inclined to hit the dancefloor, but focusing on that means you ignore the carnival anthems, the riff-rockers (in both loud and jangly varieties), the theatrical centrepieces and the synthesizer mood moments that inhabit Reflektor's two discs. The underlying narrative thread is on sustaining a groove of some kind and letting the rhythm lead the way as much as the melodies, but Reflektor casts its nets far wider than just that.

Reflektor is split into two discs, mainly out of circumstance: the band intended to make a short record, which they failed to do spectacularly when they kept writing 6-7 minute songs, and so splitting the final album into two distinct halves was primarily a way to compromise on the initial idea. That said, the two discs do also roughly correlate with the album's main lyrical concepts and, coincidentally or not, also arrange the album's musical motifs into tidy movements. The first disc is the endlessly style-shifting beast that walks a varied journey across only seven songs, where Regine Chassagne's Haitian roots (which inspired much of the record from the sound to the stagewear and the promotional graffitis that signalled the album's arrival) meet with the co-production from LCD Soundsystem's James Murphy, who casts his New York cool all over the songs. It's also where the whole 'reflector' concept comes in play the most: at the time Win Butler was binging on Søren Kierkegaard and his writings about "a reflective age", mass conformity and their effect on human identity, and those particularly existential flavours form the thematic line between the otherwise disjointed songs. Meanwhile the second disc is a more tightly knit musical suite which operates within similar soundscapes throughout its dramatic flow, utilising the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice and its tragedies love affair as the central lyrical inspiration for its six songs. The band were also working for the score for Spike Jonze's film Her around the same time and there's traces of its takes on love as a mystical force running across the tracks as well: directly in case of "Supersymmetry", which was composed for the film and then reformatted for Reflektor. 

 

What Arcade Fire have created with Reflektor is a space where those potentially preposterous - or pretentious, if you wish, but I'd give you a disappointed glare - ideas and Butler's wildly hit-and-miss writing pen find a musical format where they turn out to work phenomenally. When I talk about Reflektor being dense, it's because it's a record where I find it harder than normal to split the concept from the sound and treat the songs as just songs, because you have all these thematic threads from the Haitian carnivals to love after literal and metaphorical death to 'we live in a society' style creeds, and then they're bundled up with songs which are impossibly stylish and yet often forebodingly threatening, both looking at its topics as a cold and detached spectator and someone caught within the turmoil. This is particularly the case on the first half. "Reflektor" is only right to start the album as the title track as it's a hefty song with a lot going on - seven and a half minutes of Haitian percussion swinging with disco beats, French and English vocal swaps, David Bowie cameos, nods to the Kierkegaard writings, a tonal shift which moves the song from a cool indie club banger to a hair-raising crescendo that's like the moment you realise the storm has arrived and it's too late to run. It works phenomenally: it's one of Arcade Fire's all-time greats and as the very first song it signals accurately that there will be no limits to where this record could go.

 

The rest of disc one is effectively an extension of "Reflektor", in that it is a lot of big ideas running around to a point that they form an almost impossible to control hurricane of inspiration. "We Exist" sways even further into the disco with its "Billie Jean" bass while heavily implying but never outright saying what identity issues it exactly refers to (the official video opts for trans representation), lacing its funky slickness with both defiance and venom. The dub nod of "Flashbulb Eyes" and the carnival breakdown of "Here Comes the Night Time" are most directly inspired by the Haitian excursions the band were taking prior to the record, taking Arcade Fire into brand new waters musically but melting those influences naturally into a part of their sound. From here Arcade Fire suddenly realise they are a rock band too, and so "Normal Person" trashes the hotel room with its big electric guitars and is cathartically fun in its over the top antics and self-aware tongue-in-cheekiness, "You Already Know" is a deliciously melodic foray into 80s indie and quite possibly the most criminally underrated song across the entire two discs (and for a person living in the UK, that Jonathan Ross cameo never stops being weird), and "Joan of Arc" is all glam swagger, big drums and big fist pumps. It's a hefty, strange journey where each song is a curveball, but all the elements come together to create something incredible and truly memorable: sincerity and irony melt into a surreal concoction delivered with so much passion it doesn't matter which way it swings, the general songwriting is some of the band's strongest, and the production and arrangements are both ingeniusly detailed as well as creatively chaotic. It's a bewildering set of songs but excitingly so, a true treasure trove of creativity.

The second disc gives the album its breathing space because it's a lot less manic than the first half. The songs play more comfortably together in sound and tone, and are a more direct realisation of the threads that The Suburbs' more synth-laden moments hinted for the band to take. It's a quiet start with the reprise of "Here Comes the Night Time" acting as the bridge between the two discs and "Awful Sound" (which is anything but) acting as a calmer counterpart to "Reflektor" in how its announces its disc's themes - it bears a lush, quintessentially Arcade Fire -esque sound but updated for the reflective age, glimmering in keyboards, filters and processed drums. The second half doesn't truly kick into its groove until "It's Never Over", and when that kick arrives it's massive: the stammering, thick beat is already appropriately dramatic for the increase in bombast that the song brings, but it's in particular the moment when the verses come back alive after the first breakdown and announce their arrival with a triumphant horn section, that the second side of Reflektor truly begins in earnest. It's a spellbinding moment that continues to sound incredible each listen, with the long multi-song build-up reaping its rewards beautifully. "Porno" and "Supersymmetry" both move further into a more synthesizer-friendly ground, the former clicking and popping with such a heavily theatrical tone that it almost obscures just how great the suave build-up and chorus melody is, and "Supersummetry" gives the album a beautifully understated and quietly epic finale. Its ascending harmonies are a long cry from the frantic start of the record, with all bliss and no discord in its star-gazing atmosphere. It's a lush and gorgeous ending, even if the decision to tack on extra six minutes of ambient noise at the end is arguably one production choice too far, because it adds so little to the conclusion of the record. The album also bears a hidden pre-gap track in the null space of the first disc which is effectively just some of the key melodies of the record played in reverse, and if you ask me it would have served as a more interesting ambient outro.

What really makes the ending of Reflektor is the presence of "Afterlife" as the penultimate song, the great finale before the finale as is the band's tradition. "Afterlife" is heartache under the mirror ball, melancholy and carefully hidden despair that run away from their emotional heft onto the dancefloor to try and forget. It's a beautiful and powerful song and serves as the emotional climax of Reflektor as a whole, with the mania and thunderball energy of the album's first half returning and powering up the more introspectively charged reflection of its second half for one last dance. It sweeps away with its woah-ohs and ever-intensifying choruses while the layered percussions and simple keyboard riff give it a lightweight, light-footed tone that disguises just how colossal of a tune it is. But Butler sounds defeated and like he already knows the answer when he pleads if he can make it through; the way he utters "oh my god, what an awful word" towards the start of the song packs so much evocative emotion in how low-key loathed it is. The first disc of the record indulged in its excesses and the second disc saw the comedown slowly growing more lucid, and "Afterlife" as the whole record's undeniable highlight slots right there as the moment where all the shields come down and what's left is the same charismatic emotion and sincerity that has always shined through in the band.

That final set of songs is where Reflektor is its most emotionally evocative; in fact, for most of its duration Arcade Fire keep their usual level of sentimentality and vulnerability out of Reflektor. It's an emotionally distanced record until it starts breaking away its barriers towards its finale, and that's potentially what prevents it from being one of the all-time greats: that as much as I love Reflektor, it just lacks that one final emotional hook. My personal resonance for the album lies largely in how strongly the worldbuilding took me over. The band were creating something larger than just a record with Reflektor, with the emphasis on extramusical details that the band built around the album: the pre-release shenanigans, the more theatrical live shows with extras and dramatic stage performances, as well as the supplementing features (including the pseudo-live feature Here Comes the Night Time with its hectic celebrity cameos, an exercise in millennially ironic surreality). They were selling a full concept, and I was buying it - when a band goes the extra mile, I tend to be the type of nerd who openly bites the bait. So Reflektor isn't just the music for me, it's also the countless mental images and recollections of particularly arresting visual moments the band scattered across its period and which are now forever associated with these songs: the "Reflektor" video, the Glastonbury performance of "It's Never Over" with Regine in her own section surrounded by skeletal extras, the "Afterlife" live performances illuminated by mirrorball light (with the Tonight Show and Graham Norton Show appearances above all), the Here Comes the Night Time visuals, and more. Arcade Fire created a visually arresting and sublimely cohesive universe throughout the Reflektor period, which in its own way is awe-inspiring. It may seem irrelevant to some to highlight so many things that aren’t found within the album itself, but for me, the music of Reflektor is impossible to tear away from its peripheral material.

The music is, of course, incredible just as it is too. With Reflektor Arcade Fire threw everything around them into a singular melting pot, took a gamble to forge a new path with what they pulled out of the pot, and created a classic record: a thrilling and invigorating explosion of inspiration which, yes, is also good to dance to at times.

 

Rating: 9/10

 

Physical corner: An extremely shiny gatefold with each silver/gray element being vividly reflective (it’s just a reflector!). A separate fold-out lyrics sheet for both discs.

Ben Houge - Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura OST (2001)

 
1) Arcanum; 2) The Demise of the Zephyr; 3) Wilderness; 4) Tarant; 5) Tarant Sewers; 6) Caladon; 7) Caladon Catacombs; 8) Dungeons; 9) Battle at Vendigroth; 10) Tulla; 11) Towns; 12) The Isle of Despair; 13) Mines; 14) Cities; 15) Radcliffe's Commission; 16) The Vendigroth Wastes; 17) Villages; 18) Qintarra; 19) The Wheel Clan; 20) The Void; 21) Kerghan's Castle

An atypically mournful score for an arrestingly captivating game.

Key tracks: "Arcanum", "Tarant", "Villages"

One of the recurring phrases and themes in Stephen King's The Dark Tower series is that the world has moved on: that the passage of time is inevitable and natural, but it's made out of different eras starting and ending and that transition is rarely an instant process. Sometimes you find yourself in a time and place where the old world is dying while the new one is yet to truly begin. Whenever I play through Arcanum, that phrase keeps entering my head. The setting of Arcanum is a fantasy realm the kind of which we know inside and out, with its noble knights, fearsome dragons, powerful wizards and familiar faces from dwarves to orcs to elves. But the game itself takes place at a time when those dwarves have discovered steam technology and where the realm's most fearsome knights suffered an embarrasing defeat when the opposing nation brought out muskets. The last dragon was slain not too long ago, and the formerly ever-present magic is now being replaced by synthetic electricity as the industrial age beckons forward. The world has moved on, and many of its inhabitants have found themselves misplaced in the process.

Arcanum is a game with a great sadness in its heart. The technology that has appeared is not evil, but as the old world shifts to the new the change leaves a melancholy trace behind it. Ben Houge's beautiful score underlines this sentiment perfectly. The vast majority of Houge's soundtrack has been arranged for and performed by a string quartet, with the mournful tones of its components left to dominate the game's music almost fully on their own. It's a subdued and downstated soundtrack, with its melodies playing out like laments for the areas the player character travels in; even the combat music isn't the kind that gets your energy pumping, but one which draws out the tension of the conflict. It's only in the last four songs of the tracklist where the score changes tract: The score only changes tract for the last four tracks in the tracklist: "Qintarra" and "The Wheel Clan" feature additional percussion while "The Void" and "Kerghan's Castle" are ambient-like synthesizer exercises. They break the cohesive mood to some extent, but they're different for a reason as the first two feature in the areas that act as the few lasting remnants of Arcanum's pre-technological age, while the latter are used in the more otherwordly sections of the game which literally move away from the game's normal setting. So, they're conceptually solid and the arrangements are just as sharp (for the percussion cuts anyway, given the minimalist approach of the other two), and leaving them to the end of the tracklist is probably the least disruptive way they could be included.

If you can call a game soundtrack an underappreciated gem then this fits the description excellently - much like the game itself, which belongs in my personal pantheon of all-time greats even if the gaming world at large has moved on from it. Houge's score is a gorgeous accompaniment to the generally brilliant game because it fleshes out the game's setting so strongly and leaves an impact in just how perfectly it emphasises the game's tone. I might even carefully choose to suggest it for even those who haven't played the game, if string quartets are one's jam - the arrangements are perfectly evocative on their own.

Rating: 8/10

SIG - Hyvää syntymäpäivää: 18 hittiä (1995)

1) Hyvää syntymäpäivää; 2) Tiina menee naimisiin; 3) Vuosisadan rakkaustarina; 4) Leijailen; 5) Elämä vie mua; 6) Ludwig Van Beethoven; 7) Jos sä rakastat minua; 8) Kolme sanaa sinulle; 9) Matti Inkinen; 10) Sadan vuoden yksinäisyys; 11) Älä sinä huoli; 12) Jos taivas on vain pienille enkeleille; 13) Viipuripop; 14) Lauantaina; 15) Kartsaa; 16) Kerro mitä on rakkaus; 17) Marianne; 18) Purppura

18-hit budget compilation from a band who had about three that have survived the age of time.

Key tracks: "Hyvää syntymäpäivää", "Vuosisadan rakkaustarina"

Back when car CD players were a new thing, my dad got into the habit of buying all kinds of CDs from mid-price sections and bargain buckets - often budget "best of" compilations - to play during driving. I lived in a small town so none of our shared journeys would ever take more than 3-4 songs, and in the occasional case where we'd exceed that my dad demonstrated his very liberal use of the skip button. I've thus ended up with particularly strong memories associated with a very small handful of songs from a number of all kinds of acts from the 70s and 80s.

SIG were a Finnish example of the typical path a lot of groups took around the 80s, starting out early in the decade with a more punk-oriented sound, but soon shaping into a more of a new-wave act and getting a couple of hits out of it. Those hits are the first three songs on this compilation and they're the best it has to offer. They're the kind of Big Pop Classics that will always get airplay and stay evergreen - partially because SIG were cunning enough to have them centered around particular themes that would ensure their inclusion in any themed compilations for decades to come (birthdays, weddings and head-over-heels romance perfect for Valentine's, respectively). They're corny, a bit dated and somewhat ramshackle but that's part of their charm, and they're completely fluffy but sometimes you don't need anything else but a good hook.

I have no recollection whatsoever about the rest of the compilation, and given the songs are mostly just inferior copies of the first three songs there's not much need to go beyond those initial moments either. There's also a couple of attempts at ballads (forgettable) and a few inexplicable stabs at rockabilly (godawful), further highlighting how preposterous the "18 hits" claim in the title is. SIG aren't a classic band or anything that really needs any relevance beyond their minor part of collective Finnish pop culture consciousness, and it's clear which songs are the reason this compilation is a thing in the first place. Me owning this copy (which is the very same disc my dad used to play) is solely because of faint nostalgic reasons and it's fun to know that even though our music tastes are worlds apart, we'd both go on a skip spree with this one.

Rating: 4/10

Kent - B-Sidor 95-00 (2000)

CD1: 1) Chans; 2) Spökstad; 3) Längtan skala 3:1; 4) Om gyllene år; 5) Noll; 6) Önskar att någon...; 7) Bas riff; 8) Din skugga; 9) Elever; 10) Längesen vi sågs; 11) December; 12) Utan dina andetag; 13) På nära håll
CD2: 1) Livrädd med stil; 2) Verkligen; 3) Gummiband; 4) Att presentera ett svin; 5) En helt ny karriär; 6) Rödljus; 7) Pojken med hålet i handen (Hotbilds version); 8) Kallt kaffe; 9) Den osynlige mannen (Kazoo version); 10) Slutsats; 11) Rödljus II; 12) En helt ny karriär II; 13) Papin jahti [hidden track]

The b-sides for the first four albums; as it often is, uneven but with surprises in unexpected places.

Key tracks: "Chans", "Längesen vi sågs", "Verkligen"

Kent’s b-sides compilation arrives at the time and moment when you would have expected a greatest hits compilation to have happened, and it feels like a bit of a power move. Together with a few new songs, one which got the kind of retrospective clip show music video you normally reserve for promotional singles from best offs, B-sidor 95-00 sees Kent repackaging their career so far in their own terms, by highlighting the songs that rode off on the backs of their hits. And there were a good number of them: the 1990s were the golden period of single bonus tracks, particularly in the UK where they were an art form onto their own and often something bands were prided for: for these bands, a b-sides compilation could easily have been another hits collection. With Kent’s career so far being so very obviously inspired by their British counterparts, they had taken it upon themselves to carry that tradition in their own region.

The two discs of B-sidor 95-00 run in a counter-chronological fashion, so the first disc covers the b-sides to the mainstream hit singles from Hagnesta Hill and Isola, while the second disc features outtakes from the first two albums Verkligen and Kent. With that in mind, disc one is where you’d expect the big hitters to be but it actually feels rather... underwhelming? Or to put it in another way, it's  predictable. Not just in how it sounds, i.e. that the songs carry same slick guitar moves as their parent albums, but even in how they're presented: all the singles from Isola and Hagnesta Hill carried two b-sides (apart from "Kevlarsjäl", which was backed solely by "Längtän skala 3:1") and in each case they're a big rock song backed by a quiet, sparse mood piece next. The entirety of disc one after the first few songs (i.e. the new tracks) effectively plays out the same across the board and you end up feeling like you are constantly tracing steps back to where you just came from. Of course, this wouldn’t be the case if the material was strong enough to ignore but a lot of the songs on the first disc, and in particular those fleshed out full-band takes, feel a lot like underdeveloped or overall lesser versions of what Kent were releasing on their albums at the time. There are great songs within the bunch: in particular the beautifully growing "Längesen vi sågs" could have easily had a spotlight moment on an album and represents the kind of quality that you perhaps would have expected, and "Utan dina andetag" has a preciousness to its big 90s rock riffs which goes a long way explaining why it's become a legitimate hit in Sweden (it even got a spot on Kent's career retrospective best of collection - it’s apparently a very popular wedding song in Sweden?). But they’re one of the few that really jump out, and in fact I find myself enjoying those quiet mood pieces like "December" and "Om gyllene år" more than I do the big rock songs because they show something a little bit different in context.  

 

It is surprisingly the second disc which is where the compilation gets really interesting and exciting. I find Kent's first two albums to have been made by a band who were still clearly a work in progress: they're promising but uneven records, with the band still in the process of aligning their vision with their songwriting. And yet, these b-sides are so much more interesting than you would expect from this period in chronology. There's extensions to the band’s rock sound where they break away from the more self-serious approach on the records to something more relaxed, like the rough but big-hearted and beautiful "Verkligen" (one of my favourite things to come out of the second album’s sessions and a shame it never made it to the titular record), the scruffy riffing of "Livrädd med stil" and the stupid fun punk of "Kallt kaffe". Other songs find the band experimenting with electronic production long before it started appearing on the records, leading to excellently atmospheric cuts like "Gummiband" and "Att presentera ett svin", which sound like the works of an entirely different act to the one who recorded the A-sides. Some of the songs are obvious demos without the tag in place, but for example "Rödljus" befits from the rawer production which lends it a kind of warmth and intimacy that it might not have otherwise had. It’s so intriguing that it’s this earlier period where B-sidor 95-00 really shines, given the parent albums are among the band’s weakest (purely due to their more undeveloped nature) - it shows that Kent were holding back certain aspects of themselves away from the albums, where perhaps they felt they had to act in a more polished manner.

 

B-sidor 95-00 rounds itself off with a few new tracks as the bookends. “Chans” and “Spökstad" are two brand new songs which effectively bridge between the present and what’s next: slick and stylish production, a more programmed sound and an ear tuned for the hooks, as initially trialled on Hagnesta Hill. The sleepy ballad “Chans” is the better of the two, unfolding into a beautifully understated dramatic rise atop its ethereal keyboard layers. “Spökstad" is a preview of the upcoming Vapen & ammunition in sound and the more hit-oriented of the two songs, and it's a fine song, but perhaps suffers a little from the band effectively doing its shtick better throughout the next album. Meanwhile the end of the second disc sees the band returning to the two most obvious demos of the selection and fleshing them out years later. Kent end up treating the two songs pretty similarly, both climbing up to epic explosive finales with cymbal crashes and soloing guitars, and to be fair, they're a band who do that particular trick really well. "Rödljus" as established before already worked pretty well as a more stripped-down demo, so it's more "En helt ny karriär" that benefits from the re-envisioning as it gets to switch the placeholder drum machine into a full band, equipped to take the song where it was always destined to be. 

(There is also technically a fifth new song, the hidden track "Papin jahti" at the end of the second disc which is an improvisational comedy piece and not really worth anyone's time beyond the obvious novelty that it's meant to be - though it is fun for me to hear a Kent piece in Finnish, sung by the Finn-Swede drummer Markus Mustonen)

In the end, I suppose B-sidor 95-00 reflects the period it represents accurately enough. Kent's first four albums are a mixed bag, solely because they're like a live presentation of a band developing themselves: the rough start, the evolution, the realisation of their strengths, and figuring out their own sound bit by bit. For the first two albums Kent hid the fine-tuning of that development behind the scenes and away from the main albums, which this compilation brings out to light; with the next two records those ideas started getting the spotlight so the b-sides simply became more of what the albums offered, just not as well. It caps off one particular period of Kent's journey and empties the table before the next chapter, which is arguably why it feels so much like a curveball alternative for the standard career-so-far summary of a greatest hits compilation. But b-side compilations tend to always be either incredible or uneven, and B-sidor 95-00 is the latter. It warrants to dig deep though: that second disc is some of my favourite early Kent in full disc length.

Rating: 7/10

Arcade Fire - The Suburbs (2010)

1) The Suburbs; 2) Ready to Start; 3) Modern Man; 4) Rococo; 5) Empty Room; 6) City With No Children; 7) Half Light I; 8) Half Light II (No Celebration); 9) Suburban War; 10) Month of May; 11) Wasted Hours; 12) Deep Blue; 13) We Used to Wait; 14) Sprawl I (Flatlands); 15) Sprawl II (Mountains Upon Mountains); 16) The Suburbs (Continued)

You might think it's back to basics but really, it's a suburban sprawl: cosey and homely perhaps, but sneakily taking over new territories.

Key tracks: "The Suburbs", "Ready to Start", "Sprawl II (Mountains Upon Mountains)"

The Suburbs is a palate cleanser for Arcade Fire. Neon Bible took their crescendo-driven songwriting to its absolute limit, and I loved every orchestrally exploding, choir-drowned, organ-bellowing second of it. But, there is a limit to just how big you can get and after that you either start repeating your tricks or you can choose to move to a different aisle. It wasn't just bigger in sound but also in its message, Win Butler shifting his sights from the snow-covered neighbourhoods of Funeral to doom-mongering over the entire world. A few years later and those sentiments had moved to self-doubt, or as The Suburbs at one point puts it so aptly: "you never trust a millionaire quoting the sermon on the mount / I used to think I was not like them but I’m beginning to have my doubts”.

 

The Suburbs is a return to smaller stakes, to some extent. It's still very much an Arcade Fire record with all the epic moments that come with that name attached, but in the context of this particular group it's scaled down, stripping away a lot of the extra bells and whistles that they themselves had introduced to the 00s indie rock scene. It's more down to earth and firmly fixed in the personal scale of its titular nostalgic suburbs - Butler shrinks the record’s aim into the microcosm of the neighbourhoods and faded teenage memories, personal stories and introspection from when the rest of the world was just a blurry image in the horizon. Alongside that, the music pulls back as well: the production is more straightforward, even compared to Funeral, and the album frequently takes its time enjoying the stillness rather than ramping up to the finale, as evidenced by numerous two-parter songs with extended introductionary sequences or outros. The Suburbs still layered in multitudes - the band is a septet of multi-instrumentalists after all - but its approach is, in lack of a better word, less show-offy about the wide range of talent the band hold.

The greatest trick The Suburbs pulls is hiding its own expansiveness underneath a back-to-basics exterior: it's an experimental, transitional record in disguise. Crowd-inspiring anthems were Arcade Fire's signature move, but third time doing them in the same way and you could start wearing the concept thin - but at the same time, the band weren't seemingly sure where exactly to steer their ship either. Thus, Arcade Fire aren’t reinventing themselves here and the stylistic concepts of the first two records are running throughout The Suburbs - “Rococo” carries the maximalism of Neon Bible and the close-to-heart warmth of e.g. “The Suburbs” and “Modern Man” descend from the homegrown intimacy of Funeral. Many of the album's greatest moments have their feet stuck firmly in the band's own musical history, particularly with the hazy melancholy of its marching title track and the stunning "Suburban War" which is one of the band's most gorgeously arranged pieces with most arresting melodies - both of which still sound like familiar Arcade Fire by this stage. But those recognisable siybds are are intermittently scattered in-between the rest of the sprawling 16-track record, serving as the center for the ideas board the rest of the album represents and used as springboards to new areas. It's why it's not quite accurate to call The Suburbs simply an Arcade Fire record that got toned down, because a good two thirds of the record sees the band pulling in new ideas or executing old ones in different ways.

How that manifests most notably is in just how dynamic The Suburbs sounds - or in other words, how much it rocks. Arcade Fire have never exactly been close to the 'rock' part of 'indie rock', but for The Suburbs they channel their characteristic zeal and arena-sized energy into giving their songs a right kick under the rear. There’s a world of difference between e.g. the stadium fist-pumper “Ready to Start”, the noisy punk brattiness of “Month of May” and the baroque shoegaze of “Empty Room”, but what they all share is the sheer show of force in their sound and in the playing. One of Arcade Fire’s greatest assets is their passionate intensity and throughout The Suburbs they use that to be loud, fervent and exhilirating. Many of its most deftly arranged, gorgeously performed songs lie in its less frantic corners, but it's that punchiness of its most electrically charged songs that really sticks out when you actually play the album - and even during the subtler moments, there's a liveliness and strength to the band's play that comes naturally when now-seasoned live veterans return to bashing things out together within the same small four walls. In Arcade Fire's context The Suburbs is an intimate record, but only in the sense that the sweat in the player's brows is palpable through the sheer power of their playing, as they bring the songs to life in what is for them a relatively low-stakes production environment.

It's why “Sprawl II (Mountains Upon Mountains)” works so well at the end of the album. The other stylistic undercurrent cutting across The Suburbs is that it features a couple of songs where synthesizers dominate the soundscape - which, if you're aware of the wider discography, is in retrospect a clear test run for the ideas that would start popping around the next set of records. The twilight rave of "Half Light II" (which marries beautifully to its more Suburbs-like first half) is an exciting jolt of surprise already, but "Sprawl II" gets the fabled penultimate spot: the tracklist slot where Arcade Fire always bring out their record-defining highlights. Compared to most of the earnestly self-serious The Suburbs, it’s a complete 180° - a perkily pop-flirting number lead by Reginé Chassagne, all bright synth leads, bubbling synth bass and a light-footed, shuffling rhythm eager to hit the dancefloor. Where Butler has been searching for meaning in adolescent experiences and got lost on the path between the suburbs and where he is now (and as an aside, this is probably Butler's peak as a lyricist and "Suburban War" in particular is sublime and nails down the record's entire concept beautifully), Chassagne brings the colour back into the world. “Sprawl II” is a fantastic song, radiating with so much genuine warmth and fun - it's still caught in the anxiety of growing up somewhere so small that you felt trapped, but it's bursting with defiance and pride about escaping into the wider world. It subtly shifts up from its quaint beginnings into a veritable giant and even still it sounds so lightweight it could practically fly off. As the de facto closer of the record (the reprise of “The Suburbs” at the literal end is really just an outro), it not just brings the album's various threads together, but it turns them into the proud declaration of intent that the rest of the album shies away from - and it does it with a massive smile on its face. That contrast at the end works so very beautifully. 

 

"Sprawl II" also draws a line on the ground as it starts pulling the curtains to a close: it's the most out-and-out diversion from what had been established as The Arcade Fire Sound, and after The Suburbs the band took it as their main inspiration to move away from that sound. Which makes The Suburbs somewhat of a pivotal record for the band because while on one hand it takes a step back towards a tone closer to their roots, it ultimately represents a desire to change, for the band to start shifting shape. Yet, its stylistic experiments are still done with an overall cohesion in mind as part of the Wider Concept of the record, and they're tucked in-between songs which basically sound just like more great Arcade Fire songs - so you might never even realise just how much it's started to move away from the expected. That's why it's not necessarily one of their more stand-out records, because it feels like a slight retread unless you really start paying attention to it - and it definitely could have shaved off a few songs and the "Wasted Hours" / "Deep Blue" couplet has always been the section that comes to my mind - and I for one certainly underestimated as such for a long time after its release. In retrospect The Suburbs' true nature becomes more clear though, both as a hint towards the future and final farewell to the past, and from a completely personal angle it took me a good many years after its release to realise just how good of a record it was and why. If it's possible for Arcade Fire to release a slowburner then this is it, but its thrills are many and various.

Rating: 8/10

Physical corner: The Suburbs was released with a whopping nine different cover variants where the scenery in front of the car differs; mine is the (appropriately) suburban neigborhood shot. I didn’t choose this one specifically, it just happened to be the one in the shop at the time. Gatefold packaging with a fold out lyrics sheet.

The Ark - In Full Regalia (2010)

1) Take a Shine to Me; 2) Superstar: 3) Stay With Me; 4) Singing ‘Bout the City; 5) Have You Ever Heard a Song; 6) Publicity Seeking Rockers; 7) I’ll Have My Way With You, Frankie; 8) All Those Days; 9) Hygiene Squad; 10) The Red Cap

The Ark fizzle out towards their end, barely making their exit known.

Key tracks: "Stay With Me", "Singin' Bout the City"

In Full Regalia was released in April 2010, and before the year had finished The Ark had announced they were calling it a day. In posthumous interviews frontman Ola Salo talked about how he had been struggling to find the inspiration to write any music because he felt like he had said everything he could within the context of the band, and that he would rather consider them as a great thing of the past rather than face an uncertain future; when he contacted the other members about the idea of closing up the shop, everyone realised they had all had similar thoughts. The Ark’s last album therefore isn’t a grand farewell and a curtain bow, and rather it's the result of a group of people pushing out an album out of habit even when they've already started to think about moving on.

There isn’t much to talk about In Full Regalia, because it's got little to say for itself. It's got hints of a stylistic tweak which sees The Ark shifting a little towards late 70s and early 80s soft rock vibes, giving the impression that they were still keen to avoid repeating themselves. It's just that the songs they’ve written around that sound are the weakest selection of material they've ever pulled together. They're not so poor as to the extent that they’d actively leave a negative impression, but rather In Full Regalia is more of an indifferent shrug. It’s music that doesn’t make you hit the skip button if any of the songs come up in shuffle mode, but it makes no effort to step up and engage any further than that. The choruses don't hook, the melodies don't stick, and Ola Salo’s writing well has truly run out, just as he had confessed. At the start of the decade he wielded a razor sharp wit and laced his lyrics with both heart and cheeky wordplay, but now he's succumbed to either wishy-washy nonsense or clichés like "Publicity Seeking Rockers" or “Superstar”, both of which are literally what you'd expect from the titles alone (aimless and vague celebrity culture takedown and banal motivational poster fodder, respectively). “Superstar” is arguably the weakest song here even if it is catchier than most of the other tracks, simply because it comes across as such a low-effort crowd pleaser, with its sing-along choruses running on empty despite the stomping beat trying to make the song sound bigger than it's worth. It’s a pastiche of former glories - the exact thing The Ark were fearing to become.

 

The Ark aren’t leaving us completely empty-handed though. “Stay With Me” is a real highlight: it’s got the strongest melody of the record and the second verse guitar line in particular is simply captivating when mixed with the hazily melancholy background textures, Salo pulls out his best vocal performance on the record and for the whole of the song the band sound genuinely inspired and engaged. It’s moodier and more restrained than most of the record and sounds like the result of a whole different writing session, but somehow ironically has more life to it than the rest of the record, which generally bounces around with a lot of energy to make up for what it lacks in other departments. "Stay With Me" is just such a great song, and it feels unfair that it's ended up practically forgotten (including by myself) just because the rest of the album turns you off touching the record. It does also kick off a minor peaking point in the record when it's followed by "Singin' Bout the City", which turns out to be the album's second most memorable cut by way of its string embellishments and an inspiredly whirlwind, tone-shifting structure. It's not a high that admittedly lasts long, but it's there.

It still surprises me that I can only list those two songs as something to give a listen for though, and barely anything else. It's clear that everyone was already over the band by the time they got together to record In Full Regalia and maybe it was just denial that made the album happen in the first place, and so no one's really brought their A-game into it - probably because they just didn't have the energy for it. To their credit, The Ark were always a strikingly charismatic band and that hasn't changed. Even when they stumbled on the previous albums, there was energy and passion that shone through which has been synonymous with them since day one - if repeat listens of In Full Regalia have shown anything is that The Ark aren't willing to phone it in, but they simply don't have much to work with here. It's an album that absolutely dies solely by being so full of sub-standard material, and it’s a shame. The Ark were such a bright and exciting flash of thunder with their early albums, and it’s actually quite sad that their last record fizzles out, barely making a ripple.

Rating: 4/10

 

Physical corner: Jewel case with a comprehensive lyrics + photos booklet. I've got the basic edition - I never bothered with the deluxe edition that came with a full magazine loaded with interviews, trivia, etc.